Discussion & Reflection

Although many Americans today may find it difficult to understand earlier American hatred towards white Irish Catholics than the racial hatred expressed towards African slaves, religious hatred such as that of Protestants towards Catholics supposedly existed earlier, lasted longer, and killed more people than racial hatred and bigotry. Indeed, there were other white people, most notably Irish Catholics, who were considered inferior by the majority of Americans and thereby mistreated and stigmatized.

Anti-Catholicism has been a part of American history since before it was even a sovereign nation; anti-Catholic laws existed even in the pre-Revolutionary era, when America consisted of just a few British colonies. Religious contempt toward the Irish surged in the mid-nineteenth century, when the devastating potato famine caused greater numbers of Irish to immigrate to the United States than ever. Consequently, several anti-Catholic publications and groups established themselves in the northeast. Countless Catholic churches were burned throughout New England and the Midwest. Protestants perpetuated the view of the Catholic church as sexually immoral through popular books like Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. In addition, Protestant Americans feared that the great numbers of Catholics pouring into the country would destroy democracy and cause a nationwide conversion to “Popery,” (Painter 136).

Despite the broader scale of religious hatred and violence in the United States, American society remained rooted in ideas of racial difference and color hierarchy. Race was applied to Irish immigrants with nearly the same frequency and prejudice as their religion. Due to their racial status as Celts, many native-born Americans viewed the Irish as a separate race inferior to the Anglo-Saxon English. They were even referred to as “white chimpanzees” (Painter 135). Masses of American writers and cartoonists emphasized this racial aspect of the Irish by depicting them as apelike, ugly, violent, ignorant, drunken, lazy, and filthy sub-human people, which ultimately enforced and reinforced the Paddy stereotype of the Irish. Paddy jokes became a constant source of amusement for the “better classes” in American society.

During this era in history, many people, both patronizing Irish sympathizers and vehement nativist haters of the Irish, equated and compared the Irish to African slaves. Undoubtedly, both Irish immigrants and enslaved Africans were considered racially other and inferior in relation to Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent. The destitution, starvation, and poverty that the Irish experienced in the midst of the potato blight reminded many American intellectuals who visited Ireland at this time of the unspeakable suffering of African slaves in the U.S. “American visual culture” (Painter 142) in the form of cartoons and the like also equated the Irish Paddy with the “Negro.” Despite the similarities between these two groups, Irish immigrants themselves violently rejected these comparisons and tried to use the color lines present in American society to elevate themselves over black people by supporting the pro-slavery Democratic Party.

The combined status of the Irish as Catholic Celts, hated both for their religious differences as well as for their racial otherness, spurred mob violence at the hands of groups like the Know-Nothings, who soon acquired great political power for their anti-Catholic position, and the Order of United Americans. As slavery became a more pressing issue, however, Know-Nothingism lost most of its influence.

The chapter begins with an introduction of the attitudes towards Irish Catholic people throughout history. Although technically white these people are often compared to Negro people in terms of the treatment they receive from their society. Throughout history there has also been an ongoing conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism.

The early part of the chapter discusses the what situation was for Irish people in Europe and what caused so many of them to immigrate to the US during the mid 1840’s. “The history of the poor is the history of Ireland” (pg 134). This is a general trend for the Irish people. In Europe they faced oppression from British rule and were viewed as inferior. What made this worse was the political and economic unrest that Europe was facing during this time period. Ireland was hit especially hard. Most of them were peasants and relied heavily on agriculture. When faced with failed harvests they had no choice but to move. This is what caused that huge influx of immigration to the US. In addition to Irish immigrants there were a great deal of Germans who came.

By the Mid 1850’s there were huge concentrations of Celts in the US, especially in the cities (specifically NY). Once arriving in America the Irish immigrants faced further struggle. Since they were poor peasants their place in American society was limited. They concentrated in slums and were viewed negatively by natives. This is when stereotyping emerges. Cartoon played a big role in the emergence of the Paddy stereotype. Irish people were often depicted as ape like figures. The author includes some images of cartoons from the time. Many of these cartoons featured Negros and Irish people as similar figures.

Nativism became relevant in the politics of this time. American felt threatened by this influx of people from Europe. This effected the political environment of the country as well. The development of the Know Nothing Party is a prime example of the nativist sentiment of the time. There was generally a lot of political tension regarding immigration and the Irish became the focus of discrimination. Coupled with the religious tensions this was an especially hard time for that group of people.

Today we think of race as being determined solely by the color of a person’s skin. However, in the early 19^th century when the Irish were immigrating to America by the thousands, races were divided by not only skin color, but also by things like nationality and religion. The Irish were categorized as Celts, and were deemed aesthetically and personally inferior to Anglo-Saxons.

A lot of the anti-Catholic views upheld in America could be credited to the anti-Catholic legislation in British colonies. After seeing Ireland for themselves, Gustave de Beaumont equated Celts with negroes for being the lowest life forms, and Thomas Carlyle equated Celts with animals, and assumed that they were inherently lazy and stupid.

In the mid 1830s, “Samuel F.B. Morse, the father of the American Telegraph” (Painter, 135) and Yale alumnus and prime minister Lyman Beecher were two popular figures in America whose anti-Celt views helped influence others to feel the same. Morse wrote texts about why Celts were lesser than Anglo-Saxons, and Beecher preached strongly anti-Catholic sermons, which led a mob to burn down the Ursuline convent school in Charlestown.

In 1836, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed became very popular and well know, and sold “some 300,000 copies by 1860” (Painter, 136). The book told Maria Monk’s story of what it was like to be a nun in the Catholic church, and how nuns’ obedience to the priests often involved rape of the nuns and murdering offspring. Even after investigation of the validity of the story “quickly disproved Monk’s allegations” (Painter, 137), it led many publications to be written about how bad and immorally sexual Catholicism was. This of course caused more people to have anti-Catholic views.

A variety of crises occurring in Western Europe in the mid-1840s, including political unrest and agricultural failure, led many mainland Europeans to immigrate to America. This great increase in America’s immigrant population led to the creation of the first U.S. census in 1850, which showed that nearly half of the immigrants were from Ireland. Despite the diversity of the German immigrant population “in terms of wealth, politics, and religion” (Painter, 138), they were better received than the Irish due to their tendency to become wealthy. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a leading intellectual in America, furthered this clear distaste of the Irish in his writing by reinforcing the Paddy stereotype.

Cartoons also “played an important role in reinforcing the Paddy stereotype” (Painter, 141). Thomas Nast, editorial cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly pictured a balance beam with a negro on one side and a Celt on the other to represent their equal inferiority to Anglo-Saxons. Even those who were on the pro-abolition side of slavery could draw parallels between the Negro and Celt. After a “visit to Ireland in the famine year of 1845” (Painter, 143), Frederick Douglass did just that. However, Irish people in the United Stated were totally against this assumption, for they understood that although they were Irish, it was better to be white in America than to be black. This anti-black ideology led many Irish to vote in favor of the pro-slavery Democratic Party.

During the mid 19^th century when Irish nationalism flourished, two non-Irish writers named Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold “laid a basis for the study of Celtic literature” (Painter, 144). Despite their rather condescending and patronizing words, they shed light on the idea that though the Celts may have been a pathetic race, it was not the fault of an inherently inferior mind, but rather that of unfortunate circumstances and situations in their country. Nevertheless, the Celts took a liking to these writers at the time.

The Order of United Americans was an extremely violent anti-Catholic terror group that first appeared in New York, and by the mid-1850s had “flourished in sixteen states” (Painter,147), including Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Then, the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, a nativist American and anti-Catholic group, was founded in New York. These groups and others like them were known as “Know-Nothings” because they “responded to queries about their orders with “I know nothing”” (Painter, 147). Mobs were incited by these groups upon a visiting papal envoy in 1853, and “a mob in Ellsworth, Maine tarred and feathered a Catholic priest before nearly burning him to death” (Painter, 148) in 1854.

The influx of anti-Catholic views led many of the members of these Know-Nothing groups to be elected into office during the fall elections of 1854. When in office, they passed bills that prohibited “people not born in the United States from holding political office and … extend[ed] the naturalization period to twenty-one years” (Painter, 149), which in turn made it more difficult for immigrants to vote and be involved in politics.

Know-Nothings did well in elections and were a powerful group until “1855 [when] the question of slavery in the Nebraska Territory” (Painter, 150) separated the pro-slavery south from the pro-abolition north. Most Know-Nothings from the north joined the newly-founded Republican Party, and those from the south rejoined the Democratic Party. While the worst of the violence against poor Irish-Catholics was over, they were still viewed as Celts. They as well as Africans remained inferior to Anglo-Saxons, who “monopolized the identity of the American” (Painter,150).

Lucia Lopez

In today’s world, the concept of racism is normally directly paired with the topic of skin color. What most people fail to recognize, however, is that American hatred towards other white people has also been a horrible problem in the nation’s history. Not all white people were privileged in American society, and this is seen when looking at the experiences of Irish Catholics in the Unites States in the 19th century.

Before 1820, Irish immigrants had easily fit into American society due to their Protestant religion. They had begun to call themselves “Scotch Irish” in order to distinguish themselves from the Catholic-Irish population. Catholics had been discriminated against for years in the British colonies as well as in the United States. Up until 1821, Catholics were denied citizenship in New York unless they declared faithlessness to the Pope. In Massachusetts, all people were expected to pay taxes to fund Protestant churches until 1833.

During the Irish potato famine in the 1830s and 1840s, intellectuals began to discuss the roots of the problems the  Irish were facing. Although many, like essayist Thomas Carlyle, believed the Irish to be a genetically inferior race, some such as Gustave de Beaumont believed that the essence of their suffering was British policy. Since the seventeenth century, Catholics had been deprived of land ownership by Protestant English settlers. Still, most at the time believed that the Irish, like African Americans, lacked the desire to add any value to society.

Also immigrating to the United States were Germans. German Americans had more easily blended in due to their wealth and Protestantism. Meanwhile, things were getting much worse for the Irish; they had received the reputation as drunk, violent, lazy people- this archetype became known as “the Paddy”. This figure was enforced by cartoons, depicting the Irish as ape-like and contrasting their facial features to those of Anglo-Saxons.  

Although color did not play a main role in race relations as the Irish were first discriminated against, it became of importance when the Irish began to be compared to the black population of America. Although both groups were seen as inferior, poor, and lazy, the Irish used their skin color to draw a distinction between themselves and African Americans and put themselves above them. They even went as far as supporting the proslavery Democratic Party. the draft riots followed, in which the Irish clearly rejected the concept of black-Irish commonality.

Soon a group arose in the political sphere that claimed they knew nothing when it came to choosing a party to associate with, dubbing themselves the “Know-Nothings”. Their distaste targeted alcohol and Catholicism mainly, and while they made efforts to enforce laws according to their views they usually did not succeed. Soon, as issues such as slavery became more pressing, members of the party began to take sides and the party slowly disappeared after losing so much of their following. Despite their disappearance, hatred towards the Catholic Irish continued for years. Nativism continued and Celts and Africans were still seen as subordinate members of society; the Irish, however, held on to their whiteness for value.